Declaration and Confession of the True
Orthodox Christians
We the hierarchs, clergy, and people of the True Ortho-
dox Church, under the presidency of His Beatitude, Aux-
entius, Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, seeing that Ecumen-
ism teaches of a Church of Christ consisting of branches with dif-
fering or even opposing doctrines and practices; that it attributes
efficacy for salvation to the sacr aments of the non-Or thodox—
who have lost or never had the canonical for m of baptism, and of
whom many ordain women to the priesthood and episcopacy,
while others do not recognize the priesthood at all; that it mani-
fests these beliefs in joint ser vices and common prayer with
Or thodox, heterodox, and even non-Christians and pagans; and
that in so doing it seeks to enslave our spiritual freedom and the
Truth of Christ to falsehood and to the powers and concer ns of
this world, which is the spirit of Antichrist; we hereby declare
Ecumenism to be the culmination of all heresies, entirely contrary
to the Apostolic Faith of the Fathers, abhorrent to the Holy Trini-
ty, and the preparation for Antichrist, and that any of the Faithf ul
who holds communion with Ecumenists or espouses their tenets
is subject to all the anathemas that fall upon heretics.
Considering, f urther more, the great betr ayal of the Church
per petrated by Metropolitan Serg ius, the locum tenens of the Patriarchal throne of Russia, on July 16 ⁄ 29, 1929, when he enslaved the Church to the atheist Communist state—or rather when he created a schism from the Church to enslave himself and his followers to the prince of this world; considering the seven decades of murderous persecution inflicted by the Moscow Patriarchate upon the Orthodox who remained steadfast in the confession of faith expressed in the encyclical letter of September 14 ⁄ 27, 1927, issued from the Solovki concentration camp itself by the confessing bishops and martyrs, condemning Metropolitan Serg ius and all who followed his treacherous path; and considering that his heirs, the present hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate, have neither condemned Sergianism, which gave what is God’s to Caesar, nor ceased to betray the Apostolic Faith by their participation in the World Council of Churches and the heresy of Ecumenism, nor cast out of their congregations the protestantizing spirit of the “Living Church,” condemned by the sainted Patriarch Tikhon, with its transgression of the canonical baptism by triple immersion and many other innovations which make it unrecognizable as Orthodox in its doctrines and practices; we solemnly declare that any of the Faithf ul who holds communion with any of the Sergianists and their successors is violating the Tr uth and Faith of Christ and is submitting to the spirit of Antichrist and is subject to the anathema of the Church.
February, 1993